The language of psychiatry is a monologue of reason about madness.
In order to fix the vocabulary, let us say that we will call knowledge-connaissance the system that allows desire and knowledge-savoir to be given a prior unity, reciprocal belonging, and co-naturalness. And we will call knowledge-savoir that which we have to drag from the interiority of knowledge-connaissance in order to rediscover in it the object of a willing, the end of a desire, the instrument of a domination, the stake of a struggle.
The secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is – to live it dangerously.
The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.
The corollary of the possibility of conceiving other worlds – this one being, de facto, only a domain – is the impossibility of moving beyond the world we inhabit and the imperious necessity of accepting its frontiers as limits.
I have not tried to write the history of that language, but rather the archaeology of that silence.
With humanity, life has ended up with a living creature that never quite finds itself in the right place, a living creature destined to wander and endlessly make mistakes.
That is not all, however: this relationship between writing and death is also manifested in the effacement of the writing subject’s individual characteristics. Using all the contrivances that he steps up between himself and what he writes, the writing subject cancels out the signs of his particular individuality. As a result, the mark of the writer is reduced to nothing more that the singularity of his absence; he must assume the role of the dead man in the game of writing.
Moreover, it is not entirely without significance that true love was, in Platonic philosophy – but also, as you know, in a whole sector, a whole domain of Christian spirituality and mysticism – the form par excellence of the true life. Since Platonism, true love and the true life have traditionally belonged together, and to a large extend Christian Platonism will take up this theme.
I am not a professional historian: nobody is perfect.
The body is given meaning and wholly constituted by discourse. The body vanishes as a biological entity and becomes instead a socially constituted product which is infinitely malleable and highly unstable.
Do not acid vapors have the very properties of melancholia, whereas alcoholic vapors, always ready to burst into flame, suggest frenzy; and sulfurous vapors, agitated by a violent and continuous movement, indicate mania?
It should be possible to discuss what I have put forward. Sometimes, when it has not been a good lecture, it would need very little, just one question, to put everything straight. However, this question never comes. The group effect in France makes any genuine discussion impossible. And as there is no feedback, the course is theatricalized. My relationship with the people there is like that of an actor or an acrobat. And when I have finished speaking, a sensation of total solitude...
The public execution did not re-establish justice; it reactivated power. In the seventeenth century, and even in the early eighteenth century, it was not, therefore, with all its theatre of terror, a lingering hang-over from an earlier age. Its ruthlessness, its spectacle, its physical violence, its unbalanced play of forces, its meticulous ceremonial, its entire apparatus were inscribed in the political functioning of the penal system.
When I write, I do it above all to change myself and not to think the same thing as before.
The punishment must proceed from the crime; the law must appear to be a necessity of things, and power must act while concealing itself beneath the gentle force of nature.
It is no longer possible to think in our day other than in the void left by man’s disappearance.
Liberty, far from putting man in possession of himself, ceaselessly alienates him from his essence and his world.
The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.
I had been mad enough to study reason; I was reasonable enough to study madness.
Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it.